C4 antho - Chamber Four

~42~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
* * * *
My father’s later trips were sporadic, unplanned. When I
was twelve he was gone for six weeks. My mother said, “Your
father went for a drive.” Sometimes years would pass by before
he drove out west again.
When I turned fifteen, my father left for the desert and
was gone for three months. And I held no resentment for the
man. Instead, I developed a second image, a brain-secret
version of my father that involved monk’s robes,
sandals―just him, the sun and, for some reason, a battery
powered eight-track player. I imagined Gregorian chant as
he cooled his feet in oasis water.
My mother said, “Your father is the kind of man who
needs space.”
* * * *
Last January, among others, there was Thom and myself
on the playa. Also, of all things, a recently disassociated
Unarian woman. She confessed to giving up her faith in the
second coming of an inter-dimensional Martian father―the
cosmic victor who would one day return for her, and how
many thousands of others, in one of Yahweh’s UFOs for a
starry journey to who knows where fueled by love and tiedye.
And there were two Jehovah’s Witnesses, young men,
brothers maybe. It was their second year and their last, they
told us. They remained largely silent, but could not help revealing
a terribly tiring fight in their faces. It’s remarkable
what we tell each other even when we say so little.
And there was Lorraine. An atheist housewife from
Austin who for four years has spent one week away from her